Fixing Broken WiFi on Inspiron 9400 in Ubuntu Karmic

A Church article with View Comments posted 25 November 2009.
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I just got done with a fresh install of Ubuntu Karmic on my big laptop – the 17″ Dell Inspiron 9400. Almost everything installed flawlessly – I continue to be amazed at how much faster and easier it is to install Ubuntu than other operating systems and even Linux distributions. The one problem was with wireless.

It turns out that the iwl3945 firmware that ships with Karmic has a bug that prevents the Intel wifi from connecting if the access point offers WPA2 encryption with AES as a possibility for security. To fix this bug, follow these steps:

  1. Download the latest iwl3945 firmware from the Intel Linux Wireless site.
  2. Make a copy of the /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-3945-2.ucode file that contains the old firmware.
  3. Copy the new iwlwifi-3945-2.ucode to /lib/firmware
  4. Reboot. (I suppose you could fiddle with modprobe instead.)

I’ve been very impressed with Karmic, especially once I did a little bit of fiddling to install the software that I prefer (vlc over totem, Skype, etc.). Best of all is the boot time – 31 seconds from kernel init to usable desktop on this almost 4-year-old hardware is very nice. Plus, compiz has matured enough that the “Extra” visual effects run very smoothly on the on-board i915 chipset.

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